More than 100 women are said to have taken part directly in the Rising. Many were members
of the republican organisation Cumann na mBan, which declared in its constitution an explicit commitment to the use of force
by arms against crown forces in Ireland, alongside its equality agenda.

Doctors and nurses doubled as daring despatch riders. They made food for Irish Volunteers,
treated the wounded and — like Markievicz who shot dead a policeman near St Stephen’s Green early during the Rising hostilities —
fought side-by-side with the men.
from EasterRising1916.ie

Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, on the extreme right on the banner, was an activist and involved in important events
and organizations before and after the Rising, through the later War of Independence,
the formation of the Free State, the Civil War, and through the many steps to the formation of the Republic. Her leadership in forming the
Irish Women's Franchise League in 1908 was especially important, leading as it did to early suffrage
for Irish women, with equal suffrage granted upon independence from the UK in 1922, six years before full franchise was granted
to women in the UK.

Hanna was married to Francis Sheehy Skeffington and
[when they married they each adopted the other's family name]. He was arrested ('unarmed and unresisting'
as witnesses later testified) and brought to Portobello Barracks. The following morning Francis Sheehy Skeffington
(along with two other men) was marched out into the yard of Portobello Barracks. A firing party of seven was given the order
by Captain Bowen-Colthurst to shoot the men dead.
His murder during the Rising, on the orders of a deranged British officer (Captain Bowen Colthurst), extinguished an important
and distinctive voice for a different kind of non-violent resistance, a vision arguably made all the more vital, but impossible,
by the executions of the other leaders.

the Opening Reception and film is $20;
Regular screenings are $11;
Weekend is $25, and the Closing Gala is $25;
Membership is $70 for all events (screenings and receptions).

The costs for all our individual screenings /
receptions and for our Membership are as 'Suggested Donations' per Concordia policy.

Click
here
for more information, and please read our note on the Members' page.

It's the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and that has played a role in our weekend...

...programming. Click on the images in the banner, or on
,
to learn more about the part these men and women played.

Sign up if you'd like to be on our email list
and get our latest updates. Visit our Members' page
to read how to enrol as a member for our 2016 Season - increased to $70 this year.

Our programmers have been scanning film fleadh catalogues
and soliciting recommendations and screeners from our
film and filmmaker contacts in Ireland, and especially from IFI,
the Irish Film Institute
.

We are, of course, always interested in direct contact from filmmakers with films they'd like to submit.
The 2013 winner of our first-time Short Films Audience Award was Shimmy Marcus,
with Rhinos.
He had contacted us with a submission before we'd discovered it ourselves. He was back again the next season
with a second winner, Hannah Cohen's Holy Communion!

We are always interested in submissions and recommendations of Irish-related films,
whether they be features, shorts, documentary, animation, in Irish or English.

Bill Brownstein (click for his page at the Gazette)
has been a columnist at the Montreal Gazette since 1987, commenting on city and cultural life in Montreal.
He is also the author of "The Story of Schwartz's Hebrew Delicatessen".
Bill tells the colourful story of Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen and the origins of its unique smoked meat.
In a style reminiscent of Damon Runyon’s descriptions of New York’s flamboyant street characters in the 1920s and 1930s,
Brownstein vividly portrays the succession of Schwartz’s eccentric owners (starting with Reuben Schwartz in 1928),
its staff (we meet broilerman The Shadow, the father of steak spice), the larger-than-life characters of the Main
who called Schwartz’s 'home', and some of the tourists, actors, comedians, journalists, politicians, filmmakers,
students, and many other customers who pass through its doors.
With humour and the eye of a social historian, Brownstein documents and grapples with such issues as the smoked meat
and pastrami debate, the food police, the perils of expansion, and language laws. [from The Gazette]

Fuelled by excellent performances, Noble has an uncomplicated integrity to it
that will warm even the most resistant heart.
- Irish Times [Donald Clarke]

As written and directed by Irish filmmaker Stephen Bradley, it's one of those movies that can be described
as a triumph of the human spirit without any winking whatsoever, because the outlines of the story are true.
- RogerEbert.com [Matt Zoller Seitz]

A feisty, passionate performance by the Irish actress Deirdre O'Kane gives
the inspirational biopic Noble a serrated edge of defiance and gumption.
- Int'l New York Times [Stephen Holden]

How do you capture a personality so enormous as Christina Noble? Over the last
quarter of a century, the indomitable Dubliner has toiled energetically to improve the lot of orphaned and abandoned children
in South East Asia. Those public achievements ask a great deal of a biographical film-maker, but it is, perhaps, harder still
to get any grip on Noble's tragic, puzzling, occasionally fantastic personal journey.

Stephen Bradley's response in his big, thumping bruiser of a film has been to unplug the tearducts,
ramp up the period detail and fuel the melodrama. Noble is rarely subtle. The depictions
of the heroine's life in grim mid-century Ireland have all the dustily picturesque misery of a Catherine Cookson adaption
(by most accounts, Noble's early experiences were considerably worse than those represented in the film).

More than a few characters telegraph their looming narrative arcs within seconds of appearing on screen:
the creepy sex tourist; the initially resistant, ultimately helpful, functionary; the nun who seems "nice at first".
Yet there is no doubt that the thing works.

Bradley, who writes and directs, employs an effective twin narrative. We begin with Noble,
in the adult form of Deirdre O'Kane, making her first journey to Vietnam during the 1980s.
She checks in at a down-at-heel hotel and, before too long, has begun the benign meddling that characterises so many of
the most effective charity campaigners. Every now and then we flash back to find the young Christina growing up in Ireland.
The film would be nothing without robust actors. Happily, Bradley has dragged out two excellent turns to support O'Kane's sturdy lead.
Gloria Cramer Curtis is irrepressible as the childhood Noble: a noisy, capable scamp
who loved to warble the songs of Doris Day. The Tony and Olivier-nominated Sarah Greene,
one of our best young actors, is nothing less than magnificent as Christina in late adolescence and young adulthood. Her friendship with
Ruth Negga's) plucky fireball has the makings of a film in its own right.
Irish Times - Donald Clarke

In 1989, Irishwoman Christina Noble (Dierdre O'Kane)
arrives in Ho Chi Minh City as a fortysomething tourist after a lifetime of coming to terms with her horrendous childhood and adolescence
in Dublin. She grew up in a slum, lost her mother to tuberculosis and her father (spiritually, anyway) to drink,
and was a ward of both the state and the Catholic church. She spent much of her teens and twenties suppressing her agony
over those traumas and new ones, including an unplanned pregnancy ending in adoption. The sight of so many homeless kids
on the streets of Ho Chi Minh city awakens the adult Christina's submerged maternal impulse. After trying and failing
to help kids personally (bringing two girls to stay with her at her hotel; taking a gaggle of kids to eat in a restaurant
on her tab) she decides to start a shelter, and is granted a permit. The catch: she has just three months to find a local partner
and fund and build the place, after which point her tourist visa (which was always shaky thanks to her disruptive do-gooding) will expire.

Bradley's script jumps around in time, starting with the childhood of young Christina
(Gloria Cramer Curtis), which is envisioned subjectively, less as a documentary report
than as scene one in a self-creation myth. The sooty 1940s urban panoramas, complete with piles of rubble and hand-washed clothes
hanging from laundry lines and fire escapes, have the funereal grandness of Alan Parker's film version of "Angela's Ashes",
but there's also a genuinely (and literally) lyrical undertow produced by young Christina's angelic singing voice
(she wants to be a great musical star like Doris Day) which echoes on the soundtrack during key scenes.
RogerEbert.com - Matt Zoller Seitz

John Butler will be joining us over Skype to talk about the film with our audience.
Butler won the Director's Finders Series with The Stag.
John Butler directed and co-wrote the award winning sketch show "Your Bad Self".
His debut novel, "The Tenderloin" was published by Picador and short-listed at the Irish Book Awards.
He has written award-winning short stories, directed award-winning short films and commercials, and other written work
has appeared in The Dublin Review, the Irish Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and on NPR.[click for more on Butler at www.irishfilmboard.ie]

The Stag is a film with both a heart and a brain,
an exploration of male interplay wrapped around a drama about friendships and romance, both of the fulfilled and failed kinds.
- Never Felt Better blog [David Costelloe]

This present account - of a wayward walking weekend in Wicklow - at least forms one of the more likable variations
(…on The Hangover), holding back the willy-waving to examine how a set of middle-class Irishmen might well interact
if pushed beyond their usual boundaries.
- The Guardian [Mike McCahill]

A stag weekend gone wrong is the basis for a surprising amount of comic depth,
minus the excesses of the Hangover franchise …this innocuous but good-hearted Irish comedy finds a misfit group of men
going native in the woods when a fussy groom is strong-armed into a stag weekend by his altogether more forceful bride.
- Observer [Mark Kermode]

The Machine is a cultural figure for an older and unreconstructed Irish machismo
and his knack for roughing-up his smoother, more contemporary fellows conveys real comedic truth.
- The Irish Post [Stephen Martin]

Chaos strikes when an engaged man (Hugh O'Conor), his future brother-in-law (Peter McDonald)
and a group of friends go hiking in the Irish wilderness for a bachelor party.The Stag tells the story of a very modern Irish groom-to-be who, at his fiancee's urging,
reluctantly agrees to a stag weekend with his urbane friends, wild camping in the west of Ireland.
Much to their chagrin, the brother of the bride - 'The Machine' - a crazy, unpredictable alpha male, and an explosive Id
to their collective Ego joins these modern men.
Irish Film Board

Some day, all male-centred comedies will be modelled after
The Hangover.
This present account - of a wayward walking weekend in Wicklow - at least forms one of the more likable variations,
holding back the willy-waving to examine how a set of middle-class Irishmen might well interact if pushed beyond their usual boundaries.
As the BBC's short-lived The Great Outdoors recognised, there's considerable mileage in the way these jaunts throw together diverse types.
The process by which Andrew Scott's lovelorn best man is undermined by alpha-ish interloper Peter McDonald is well-observed,
while the inclusion of two gay travellers rather smartly sidesteps one of this subgenre's signature panics. One or two set pieces
don't quite have the requisite heft, yet the movie clicks whenever co-writer/director John Butler stops to admire the scenery:
his fine cast locate the material's underlying pathos, and sustain a funny riff involving the one walker who can't stand U2
("You are Irish, right?").
The Guardian - Mike McCahill

"You rampant hurrrmurrrsexuahlists" is the somewhat grandiloquent expression one character
uses to address his fellow men in John Butler's outdoor-pursuits comedy The Stag, a slapstick romp that mischievously implies Irishmen
are not so tough as they used to be.
The man who makes this elongated utterance is called 'The Machine', played by Peter McDonald who makes a welcome return to our cinema screens.
McDonald co-scripted The Stag along with Butler and they clearly think the time is right for aiming humorous darts at the target of
contemporary Irish masculinity - in all its post-Tiger, post-modern, metrosexual complexity.
The Irish Post - Stephen Martin

Mark Noonan will appear in a taped introduction to the night's film.
Dublin-based director Mark Noonan is a writer/director working in drama and documentary. His first two short films
Questions (2008) and Getting Air (2010)
met with success at Irish and international festivals.
A participant of the 2011 Berlinale Talent Campus, Mark Noonan presented his debut feature
You're Ugly Too
in the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival's Generation Kplus Competition.Click to listen
to Mark Noonan talk with Aidan Gillen about his film You're Ugly Too,
where the story came from, and how it started small and got to be a feature, Lauren Kinsella's ability as an improvisor,
and Aidan's fit for the role. [from IFTN]

"Noonan and cinematographer Tom Comerford do splendid work making a comparatively short car drive
look and feel like an epic road trip, and David Geraghty's score is one of the best film compositions of 2015."
- The Irish Times [Tara Brady]

"An engaging, bittersweet and humorous debut about a makeshift family navigating
each other's guarded personalities."
- Galway Film Fleadh

"The first feature from Mark Noonan, You're Ugly Too is an exceptional
Irish film marked by humanity, warmth and humour, and there are terrific performances from the two lead actors,
with a striking chemistry between Kinsella and Gillen."
- www.ifi.ie [Michael Hayden]

Recently orphaned Stacey (played by Lauren Kinsella
in an auspicious debut), a pre-teen spitfire, is sent to live with her estranged Uncle Will (Aidan Gillen),
a convict who has been given compassionate leave for the purpose.
The pair journey towards a caravan park in the Irish midlands, where they attempt to approximate domesticity.

This is not an easy arrangement, and it's made doubly complicated by Stacey's narcolepsy and relentless smart-mouthing,
not to mention Will's drug-taking and parental cluelessness.

Can the pair ever get along? Can Will stick to the terms of his parole? Can he at least learn to cook dinner?
The Irish Times [Tara Brady]

"A film made all the more bittersweet by its delicate touch."
Aidan Gillen and young newcomer Lauren Kinsella play a makeshift family navigating each other's guarded feelings
in Irish writer-director Mark Noonan's debut. An engaging minor-key drama about a stopgap family solution and its lingering impact
on the two people thrown together, You're Ugly Too marks a modest but well-observed debut for Mark Noonan.
Shot in the lonely Irish midlands where the writer-director grew up and infused with an evocative sense of place,
the film showcases lovely, unforced performances from Aidan Gillen and Lauren Kinsella as an uncle and his orphaned niece
who start out as strangers but form a connection probably destined to endure.

Premiering in the Berlinale's Generation KPlus section, which often blurs the lines between films
about or intended for children and teenagers, this is a gentle reflection on the importance of trust and truth in relationships.
While the emotional stakes are high, the director generally opts to keep the drama muted, which is both a virtue and a limitation.
But that restraint also helps its mild dose of sentiment go down easily.

In an effectively drawn role that embraces the somber shades of rueful middle age
as well as the laddish vestiges of youth, Gillen (Game of Thrones) plays rough-edged Will,
who is given compassionate release six months before the end of his prison sentence to care for his 11-year-old niece,
Stacey (Kinsella). Her mother died six weeks earlier of causes that are suggested but never fully explained,
while her father has been deceased for many years.

The rapport of this odd couple is amusingly scrappy and irreverent as they dance around their masked feelings of loss,
trading barbs in a distinctly Irish surly-sweet fashion. Humor is drawn from the irony that the "eedjit" fresh out of prison
is the one endeavoring to curb the jaded tween's bad habits of spitting and cursing.

When Stacey opens up a little with her uncle it's mainly to ask why he went to prison, something her mother never told her
and Will is also reluctant to discuss. Though audiences will likely guess the reason before it's revealed,
and Stacey clearly has her suspicions, his silence on the subject contributes to keep the wall between them in place.

She makes no secret of being underwhelmed with his decision to drive them across miles of flat countryside
to stay at a caravan park where he and her mother used to go as kids. Other factors emerge as they get to know one another,
notably Stacey's bouts of narcolepsy, resulting in her being put on medication that keeps her out of school.
At the caravan park, they strike up a gradual friendship with a pretty Belgian neighbor, Emilie (Erika Sainte),
whose marriage to the moody Romanian Tibor (George Pistereanu) appears strained. A former schoolteacher in her birth country,
Emilie repays Will's kindness by offering to tutor Stacey, serving as a tentative bridge between uncle and niece.
The principal conflict concerns the limited amount of time Will has to find a job and prove that he can provide
a stable environment for Stacey, before a welfare interview to decide whether the girl goes back into the foster system
and he returns to prison to finish his sentence. That pressure, heightened by the scant employment options for a man with a criminal record,
takes its toll.
The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Terry McMahon will appear on Skype after the film for a Q&A on the night's film.
Mullingar born McMahon is an actor and writer, known for Batman Begins (2005),
Patrick's Day (2014) and Charlie Casanova (2011).
At the heart of Patrick's Day, says McMahon, is a person's right to intimacy.
"I used to work as a trainee carer in a psychiatric hospital, and I'd watch how parents or guardians would visit residents," he recalls.
"They were warm and loving and all those things, but the moment anyone aspired towards intimacy or sexuality, there was this moral,
reductionist shutting down of their aspirations."
Getting the feature into production happened rather quickly, thanks to producer Tim Palmer and a stellar cast and crew.
Financiers, both in Ireland and the UK, responded to the screenplay and funding the film was in place before McMahon knew it.
"The shoot was intense beyond measure, but there was a genuine sense of doing something special and of collective determination," he recalls.
"We had a moment where it finally clicked; we really believed we were doing something special."
Click to listen to McMahon talk about being down on his luck and society's response.
[from independent.ie / Tanya Sweeney]
As well, McMahon has a
Behind the Scenes video.

"Terry McMahon's artistry in constructing a movie that tells an emotionally, politically and socially charged story,
on a small budget, with great grace and passion, enlisting an exceptional award-winning cast and crew, is the substance of genius."
- Festival and Gig Guide [
Amanda Reis de Paula]

"Underneath Patrick's Day is … a very strong comment on the state of the nation,
a very precise metaphorical representation of Ireland that adds a further layer of depth to this remarkable, courageous and ambitious feature."
- www.cinecola.com

A young man with schizophrenia discovers love and intimacy, but is denied his right
for both in Patrick's Day, the new film by Terry McMahon which was shown at the 59th Cork Film Festival.
Moe Dunford, who plays the titular Patrick is downright astonishing. There's an overall toughness about his outlook that further strengthens
his vulnerabilities and makes his softness all the more real. Impressive to think that this is essentially his first leading role,
and given the challenge of playing a young man with a mental illness might have proved a load much too heavy for a newcomer.
Yet, his performance is restrained and never falls into the trap of overacting.
Cinematographer Michael Lavelle leaves plenty of room for close ups, a stylistic move which in itself glorifies the landscape
of the human face and adds incredible force to the intimacy of the nature of the story.Patrick's Day is quite simply a film where everything seems to work,
including the fluid pace of the film that is at once meditative but also relentless. A few things are left to mention,
and must be mentioned. Aside for the element of schizophrenia, this is a film that can be universally understood on every level.
Its structure is that of a coming of age story, and the ordeal the leading character is forced to withstand is also frightening
because it can be so easily understood by people who do not necessarily suffer from the leading character's condition.
www.cinecola.com

"This labyrinthine tale explores the push/pull between Patrick,
a likeable young man with schizophrenia, and his fiercely protective mother, a determined, driven woman who only has
his best interests at heart… or does she?
Boasting riveting performances by Moe Dunford (Game of Thrones) as the afflicted young Patrick, and the brilliant Kerry Fox
as Patrick's dragon lady mother, this audacious love story from writer/director Terry McMahon provocatively explores issues
ranging from the treatment afforded the mentally challenged to the question of when parental love becomes a destructive force.
Exceptional cinema in every way, this is an emotionally engrossing story unlike anything else you're likely to see this year."
Palm Springs International Film Festival

Set in Dublin, this beautifully made Irish love story completely captured my heart.
It is an unusual beast: a movie about delusion, deception and the power of love and intimacy to both destroy and heal
that manages to be thoughtful, heartbreaking and funny by turns.
One of the the most impressive things about the film, apart from the absolutely pitch perfect performances by all of the four leading actors,
is the way the sound and visuals support the story and engage us. Light, texture, focus, silence, music and muted sound are used
to brilliant effect.
Usually these kinds of stylistic devices draw attention to the film maker. Here, in the masterful hands of director Terry McMahon,
his cinematographer Michael Lavelle and the rest of the production team, they do the exact opposite, drawing us ever more deeply
into the characters, their dilemmas and their struggles to resolve them.
Although the narrative logic of the script falters slightly on a couple of occasions, the humor, the sheer poetry of the visuals,
the superb acting and fascinating characters (like the cop who moonlights as a standup comic) made this a wonderful addition to the festival.
The Desert Sun - [Palm Springs International Film Festival]
[Andy Harmon]

"More Than God" by
Kev Cahill
was Audience favourite.
No one who's seen it will forget the line "Maybe not for long!"

More Than God(9 mins, comedy) Dir:
Kev Cahill
Donal tries to catch his wife having an affair. Things go wrong. He's forced to hide under a bed where he bumps into his daughter.Best Short - Boston Irish FFShort Film Award - Bahamas International FFBest Director at Rhode Island International Film Festival 2015...watch trailer

Rockmount(12 mins, drama) Dir:
David Tynan
1982 Cork. Roy's 11, small, and sure he's going to get on his club's starting team. Even if no one else is.Best Short - Irish Film and Television AwardsBest Short Drama - Galway FF...watch trailer

Queen of the Plough(12 mins, documentary) Dir:
Cara Holmes
This observational documentary aims to promote and celebrate women in farming in Ireland. It follows Joanne Deery from Monaghan
and Laura Grant from Offaly in the lead up to the National Ploughing Competition.Best Documentary - Galway FF...watch trailer

Cutting Grass(13 mins, drama) Dir:
Ruairi O'Brien & John Kennedy
It's a hot summer and a young inner-city boy, Donal, is trying his hand at cutting lawns for pocket money. His luck changes when he meets Gerry.Best Irish Short - Fastnet FF...watch trailer

Pedestrian Crossing(6 mins, docu-drama) Dir:
Colin Murnane
Inspired by the Noble Call delivered at the Abbey Theatre by Irish drag queen and rights campaigner Panti Bliss,
which lit the touch-paper that helped carry the marriage equality referendum just a year later.Amnesty International Best Short Film - Isle of Wight

How Was Your Day?(14 mins, drama) Dir:
Damien O'Donnell
A woman is excited about the approaching birth of her first child. Adapted from a short story by Nollaig Rowan.Best Irish Short - Foyle FFBest Irish Short - Indie Cork FFGrand Jury Award - SXSW...watch trailer

Luke and Roger(1 min, comedy) Dir:
Kevin O'Brien
A very short film about a boy and his robot friend.Winner of the One Minute Film Festival at the Galway FF

Violet(8 mins, animation) Dir:
Maurice JoyceViolet is the dark, cautionary tale of a young girl who despises her reflection.
On the night of the school ball, tired of her abuse, Violet's reflection decides she's not going to take it anymore.Winner Best Animation - Galway FF

The Party(14 mins, drama) Dir:
Andrea Harkin
Belfast 1972. Laurence welcomes his cousin and man-on-the-run Mickey to a party of drinking, dancing, and young love.
By morning, reality catches up with them.Part of the "After 16" initiative of the Irish Film Board...watch trailer

"A Terrible Beauty, its title taken from a famous poem by W.B. Yeats , is a docudrama of extraordinary power.
It is about bullets flying and bodies falling, but it will capture you on a deeply personal level."
Chicago Tribune

"What a remarkable film, A Terrible Beauty. The Irish language with sub-titles,
the even-handed portrayal of both sides, the documentary style with the personal stories and the archive film footage
and the close-up horror of death. It was gripping - without the 'Hollywood' style 'glamorising' of war."
Irish Diaspora Foundation [Ann Towey]

"...the distinction of Keith Farrell's film is that it is so attentive to it's chosen characters
that the viewer genuinely registered both sides of the story.
...a satisfyingly complex and detailed account of what happened during that blood-soaked week."
Irish Independent

"You won't have seen a better film about the 1916 Easter Rising this Easter,
and you won't see one any other Easter...it offered something rare: a completely fresh take on the subject."
Evening Herald

"Director Keith Farrell builds the tension...and reveals the human cost of the conflict
in a series of compellingly re-staged battle scenes. Moving, balanced and meticulously researched, A Terrible Beauty
restores the ordinary soldier to the heart of the story."
Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Focusing on two of the most ferocious battles that week on Mount Street Bridge
and the area around North King Street this is the first film to tell the story from three different perspectives,
showing the human cost of the fighting on all sides.

By using first hand accounts to drive the narrative, we tell the little-known stories of
the 'ordinary' people involved in the Rising; Irish Volunteers, British Soldiers and the innocent civilians caught in the middle.
Mixing archive footage with dramatic reconstructions and first hand accounts it takes the viewer on a journey
to the very heart of the conflict, giving them an up close and personal view of the often brutal and bloody fight
which affected the lives of the men and women caught up in the chaos.

The musicians for our Ciné Concert, Susan Palmer on harp, and Alan Jones on pipes

Susan Palmer - The Celtic Harp ::
Susan Palmer studied harpsichord/baroque music at McGill under John Grew and at the Conservatoire de Musique
with Mireille Lagacé. She started playing the folk harp in Wales, and performed mediaeval music with Sanz Cuer,
for over 12 years. She has played in various Irish traditional bands (Maeve and ORO), and recorded her first CD,
Ulchabhan of Irish harp music in 2004.
Since then, she has been playing Scottish music with piper Ken MacKenzie and fiddler/singer Laurence Beaudry.
Their trio, Arisaig Mist, has played in many festivals in Quebec, Ontario and Vermont. Palmer's 2015 CD,
Sounds of War from the Glen, features melodies from the 1812 Simon Fraser manuscript. In April 2014 Palmer was awarded
the "Scottish Music" award from the Quebec Thistle Council. She is currently teaching music history (medieval to baroque)
at Concordia's Liberal Arts College.

Alan Jones - The Bagpipe ::
Alan Jones is a bagpipe enthusiast who hails from the Welsh border country, and is known for both his playing
and his collecting of bagpipes. An engineer by profession but a musician by passion, he enthusiastically enjoys
both performing on his different bagpipes and also exhibiting them whenever the opportunity arises.
He has a great passion for the traditional music of Ireland, and is in demand as an Irish Uilleann piper
in and around the Montreal area and beyond.
Alan has performed for festivals, for radio, TV and film, and in many concerts in both Europe and North America,
including with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, for a number of Canadian prime ministers, and for well-known artists
such as Ginette Reno, Isabelle Boulay, Bruno Pelltier and more. He has given museum exhibitions with his instruments in Canada,
Brittany - France, Scotland and Wales.

Ten years after the Easter Rising, in 1926, the Free State government
decided to create a new coinage for the new state. They invited the most famous poet in the world, W.B. Yeats,
to chair the design committee.

Behind-the-scenes battles were fought before the new coins became one of the most enduring
success stories of the new Irish state.

Delving into declassified British intelligence documents,
this documentary animation tells the story of two spies who could have changed Irish history. Codenamed Granite and Chalk,
the agents reported from within rebel camps as they prepared to revolt against British rule in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Baring Arms (2016)(13 mins, drama)
Dir: Colm Quinn ...watch trailer

There are many ways to commemorate the 1916 Rising, only one involves bloodshed.

Baring Arms, which was directed by Colm Quinn, brings the story of the Rising up to date
by setting it in a modern tattoo parlour.

The Ciné-Concert will have musicians providing the live soundtrack
for the 40 mins of silent newsreels. The musicians will also play at McKibbin's Irish Pub between screenings on the Saturday.

On Easter Sunday, at the IFI, there was a presentation of a ciné-concert featuring a programme of newsreels
documenting events immediately preceding and following the Uprising in Dublin in 1916. The IFI repatriated these newsreels
from international archives, such as the Imperial War Museum, and other news agencies, and presented the surviving newsreels
in their original complete form with live musical accompaniment.

With the Funding Support of a grant from the Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland): Cultural Relations
with Other Countries Programme, arranged by the Embassy of Ireland to Canada, Ciné Gael is reprising that ciné-concert
as a close to this matinée

As we approach the April 24th Anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, how are you going to remember the Rising?
One special way to connect directly with the past is through this Newsreel Ciné-Concert on Saturday,
two days before that anniversary.

This ciné-concert will be featuring a programme of newsreels documenting events immediately preceding
and following the Uprising in Dublin in 1916. The British, German, American and Irish newsreels in this short programme
were presented in 1916 in cinemas in Ireland and further afield. They are presented here with live musical accompaniment by harpist,
Susan Palmer, and piper, Alan Jones.

The story of young Vinny Byrne, a fourteen-year-old boy who found himself
fighting for Ireland in the Easter Rising. An eighty-year-old Vinny reminisces on his time with the volunteers,
which took him around the city during the fighting.

With Vinny's Dublin brought to life by the handmade miniature sets and puppetry,
the film offers a uniquely charming first-hand account of the 1916 Rising.

When The Rising starts the local sweet shops are the first to be looted
by Dubliners living in the tenements. Noel and Tom race off and leave their mothers and sisters at home but the havoc of the next few days
will come right to everyone's door.

Tell us a bit about your take on the Rising.

From an interview with Dave Tynan at filmireland.net
[Mary Wogan]

It's a story that hasn't been told before. The idea for the film came from my research.
I came across something that mentioned that the local sweet shops were the first to be looted when the Rising started -
there was a lot of looting. I thought that was interesting.

There is a great book called Dublin Tenement Life by Kevin C. Kearns.
It's the most interesting non-fiction book I have read. It's not an academic book. It's interviews with survivors of the old Dublin tenements.
Reading where people came from to where the Rising came into their lives was fascinating. These were hard times.
Your average family might have ten people in a room the size of a small bedroom. They were already at war.
The husband could well be away fighting for the Brits in the Somme or wherever - it was a better paying job than working on the docks.
Every mother lost at least one child. Mothers and kids were just left there to rot. One in three people in Dublin lived in a tenement.
They became the subject of the film.

In the film, there's a close-up of a sheep's head boiling in a pot that I'm really happy we got in this film
because that is what the diet was - dripping, stale bread and the like. So if you are used to all of that, of course,
you go for the sweets.

from the original exhibition that inspired the film -
The Exhibition remembers de Valera's 'boldest and most unmanageable revolutionaries'
The Independent [Alan Murdoch Dublin]

The documentary Guns and Chiffon commemorates
the 80th anniversary of the internment of 550 women imprisoned by the Irish Free State because they would not surrender
their ideal of the Irish Republic. The film tells the story of the fight for national independence, from the 1916 rising,
through to the War of Independence, the Civil War and the struggle for the rights of workers and votes for women.

The picture could be of housewives on an Edwardian temperance society outing. But then there are the guns.
In fact the women shown here were members of the Irish republican movement, pledged to throw off the yoke of British occupation.

Rallying to the nationalist leader Countess Constance Markiewicz's call to "dress suitably in short skirts
and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver", hundreds of Irish women, from shop girls to society beauties,
entered a world which their own journal called "a mixture of guns and chiffon".

The ordinary women, many still in their teens, who joined Cumann na mBan (the women's division of the Irish Volunteers)
fought side-by-side with the men. Today only a handful of junior members remain, among them 98 year-old Teresa O'Connell,
one of 300 Cumann na mBan women imprisoned at Kilmainham prison in Dublin in 1923.

A comrade, Katherine "Jake" Folan, a republican courier jailed there at 15 in the cell earlier occupied
by Patrick Pearse before his execution, recalled her term inside as one of the happiest in her life. The historian Sinead McCoole
argues that the republican sisterhood, having broken out of an Edwardian straitjacket that had held them in the background of public life,
had a far-from secondary role.
[full article]

...the unmaking of modern Ireland 'A bleak portrait of the end of a pocket empire'.
Writer Colin Murphy and producer John Kelleher tell Donald Clarke about bringing the story of the most expensive bank bailout
in history to the big screen.
The Irish Times [Donald Clarke]

"There is a hunger in Irish people to see a clear, unbiased version of this story. I think they are owed that,
and I think they will be surprised by the entertainment value of it - it's a real roller coaster ride."
[Director Ian Power (The Runway)]

The Guarantee recreates the drama surrounding
the most significant political decision in modern Irish history when the Irish government decided to guarantee the entire
domestic banking system. The story charts the origins of that pivotal decision (four years before that fateful night),
and follows developments through the peak of the boom to the beginning of the bust.

On the night of September 29th, 2008, the Irish government decided to guarantee the entire domestic banking system.
That decision was made by a handful of men in a room in the middle of the night. By the time the costs can be fully counted,
in another 30 years or so, it will have cost over €60 billion - the most expensive bank rescue in history.
The Guarantee tells the story of that night, and what led to it. Starting four years earlier,
it charts the peak of the boom and the beginning of the bust.
from IFI.ie

[our first Members Evening of this Season, a Members Only event. We'll have at least one more in the Fall.]

Irish singer Dolores Keane's distinctive deep, soulful voice is loved the world over.
But Dolores' life was overshadowed for many years as she battled with alcoholism, depression and more recently, breast cancer.
Now she has re-emerged from the shadows to share her story. This landmark documentary by Scratch Films for RTÉ Arts pieces together in words,
archive and classic song, the extraordinary story of one of Ireland's best-loved cultural icons.

Growing up in Caherlistrane Co. Galway, Dolores was steeped in the deep musical tradition of the area.
She first came to national prominence in 1975 as a member of De Dannann, before moving to London where she married folk musician
and singer/songwriter John Faulkner, the couple returned to Galway in 1981 and Dolores continued to perform around the country
and internationally both with Faulkner and the goup De Dannan.
In the '90s Dolores along with Eleanor McEvoy, Mary Black,
Sharon Shannon, Francis Black and Maura O'Connell, had a huge hit with their album "A Women's Heart"
and following the album's success Dolores toured the world with her own band. However, as the pressures of living on the road
and bringing up a family took its toll on Dolores, her marriage to John Faulkner ended and she became vulnerable to depression
and was increasingly reliant on alcohol in the years that followed. Dolores stopped touring in recent years but has now re-emerged
from the shadows to tell her story.